If you give an AI tool nothing but your brand guidelines, it writes like a press release, and if you give it nothing but individual freedom, every email leaving your business sounds like a different company wrote it. Most AI rollouts solve one of these and walk into the other.
Lock it down and it goes flat
It is tempting to fix adoption with one tightly controlled prompt template that locks the tone, locks the structure and goes out to everyone at once. The output is consistent but flat. Your clients can tell when they are reading something nobody wrote, which matters more to you than to most businesses, because yours trades on its reputation.
The opposite fails more slowly
Letting each of your people adapt the tool to their own style feels more human, and it works until five of them write to the same client in five different tones inside the same week. At that point one client hears five voices from your business, and nothing in the tool pulls them back together.
What your people want
Your people want to write faster in a voice that is still clearly theirs, while the business still reads as one business. A tool that flattens someone's voice gets abandoned within a few weeks, and when a tool loses your brand, people work around it and their emails drift apart again. Either failure shows up as drafts people rewrite or throw away, and measuring AI work counts those alongside the time saved.
What a company voice definition holds
It is shorter than a brand guideline, because it is written for a tool and the people using it rather than for a designer. In practice it runs to a page or two:
- The words you use and the ones you never use, including what you call your clients and your services.
- How formal you are with a client of ten years, and with one you met last week.
- Three or four emails your business has sent and is proud of, which teach a tool more than any list of adjectives.
- The lines nobody crosses, such as a date, a price or an outcome promised without a named person signing it off.
Personal voice then sits on top as a few lines per person, drawn from emails they have sent, so the tool learns how each of them opens, signs off and gets to the point.
How Track handles both at once
The Adopt phase of Cardonet AI Track treats company voice and personal voice as two separate steps in a fixed order.
First we help you write that definition, which is the floor everyone builds from. Then we help each of your people find where their own voice sits inside it, so that a direct communicator and a warmer, more detailed one can both write on-brand emails that still sound like themselves.
If you get the company voice right and skip the personal layer, adoption stalls anyway, because people stop using a tool that makes them sound like nobody. Two of your client relationship managers sitting three desks apart should not have to guess whether they are allowed to sound like themselves. Once you have defined the company voice, that question has an answer, which is usually yes inside limits everyone can see.